I never have; I’ve heard plenty about the high rates of interest, aggressive collections by the bank, etc. How about you? Are they just as much a sucker’s bet as I’ve been led to believe?
Um, yes, very bad sucker bet. Read the fine print. Do you think anyone (especially a bank) is going to give you something for nothing?!
I have, when I was in the process of paying off all of my credit card debt. I used them at various times to pay off at least a portion of another card – the rate ended up being lower (0.0-2.9% for 3 or 6 months), after which I did it again from another card.
This was always done while strictly paying the cards down – no more charges were being made. I assume that for someone not in the special circumstances I was in, it would do nothing but put them in an even deeper hole.
[Moderator Hat ON]
To IMHO.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Actually, you can use Free Money if you are savvy.
For example, if you have some debt on a different banks card and another band offers you no interest AND NO TRANSACTION FEES <— important part, that!, then you can take advantage of that…
…BUT…
read the small print. See what the length of time is before interest kicks in, the rate and all the other small type.
In “theory” you could pass around a small debt between various creditors for quite some time before “having to pay the piper” on one of them. BUT, depending on your credit the length of time to play one against the other will vary.
The short answer is: Not all credit offers are bad. Learn to recognize the bad ones. Exploit the good ones. Responsible credit management becomes an asset.
Re: terms
The thing about this one, and why the symetry holds, is that both sides approach the issue differently, instead of just disagreeing in the sides of a single approach. The pro-abort crowd sees it as a reproductive choice, hense the opposing side is anti this choice, but the anti-abort crowd sees it as a government approved murder of one’s offspring - so the term choice does not fit, but pro abort does.
I’ve never used one, but I once considered it so that I could leave my money in a different interest-bearing account for the life of the 0% rate, and then pay off the balance before the inevitable rate increase.
Of course, once I read the fine print, I realized they were going to charge me a 3% “transaction fee” up front, which made the whole thing fairly useless for those purposes.
They CAN be a sucker’s bet, but they can also save you a lot of money in interest. It depends on the terms being offered, and on what you’re using the check for.
Read the entire offer, including the fine print. Sometimes the check is just another way of getting you to spend money on your credit card account. If you do that, it was a bad idea, because you’ll end up paying the same 17/18/19/21% interest you would on your credit card.
On the other hand, if one credit card company sends you a check saying “0% interest for 6 months” or “3.9% interest for the duration of the balance,” that can be an opportunity to save money, if you also carry some debt on another credit card or under another loan.
I wouldn’t advise using a credit card check to make new purchases, but as a way of consoldidating debt, it can be helpful.
So, yes, I’ve done it. You just have to be careful.
I bought my truck through Chase Auto finance. I recieved a promotional check that offered four percentage points less than I was paying from Chase CC, for a $75 fee. It’s paid for itself.
OK, I take that back. If you are already paying CC interest they might be a good deal in some cases. I never run any interest on CCs so they are always a losing bet to me. But, I shouldn’t have been so blanket in my statement.
If it weren’t for the free checks allowing me to access my credit on paper I couldn’t have paid my rent a couple of times, so yep I’ve used them. I’ve used the ones with no fees, the ones with reduced interest rates, etc. One fun couple of months two of my credit cards issued them at the same time so I was able to transfer the balances back and forth and knock the interest rates on the two balances down by more than half for the duration of the debts.
I’ve also cashed the “we’ve identified this special offer just for YOU” checks for like $5 or whatever which in the fine print state that by cashing you’re agreeing to sign up for some wonderful service or other for $100 a month charged to your card. Just call the next day and cancel it and you’ve snagged five bucks for free.
Right, and this is usually the “deal killer” for me. But I have got soem checks with a 2.9 “for the life of the loan” and no transaction fee, and that was a very nice deal, indeed. I got another with 0% for one year, but with the 4% charge- and if I had been paying higher interest on other cards could have been worthwhile.
Thing to be VERY wary of- some banks are very very stringent on the 'one hour late and you have now defaulted back to a 28% rate" thing, so you must pay those bills early.
Risky, and not worth the $5, as in at least one case on “Action Line” they had one where you couldn’t get through *to * cancel.